Secret deal quadruples
foreign workers in U.S., Borrows from Rubio's
'Gang of Eight' bill to flood blue-collar job market, 12/16/15, by Leo Hohmann,
WND
Buried in the 2,000-page
omnibus spending bill released by the Senate this morning is a secret provision
that many senators hope unemployed blue-collar workers won’t find out about.
This provision would
quadruple the number of H-2B visas for unskilled foreign “guest workers.” It
would allow more than a quarter-of-a-million foreign workers to enter the U.S.
each year and work in the construction industry, hotel-motel services, truck
drivers, food processing, forestry and many other fields that don’t require a
college education.
A vote on the spending
bill is expected late Thursday night, possibly after midnight, sources on the
Hill told WND.
The bill also includes
funding for all of President Obama’s foreign refugee resettlement program and
does nothing to stop the proliferation of so-called “sanctuary cities.”
Legal immigration is
already at an all-time high, with 1.1 million foreign-born persons coming to
the U.S. every year, and a recent Pew Research poll shows 83 percent of the
voting public wishes to see the level of immigration frozen or reduced.
House Speaker Paul Ryan,
R-Wisc., reportedly helped negotiate the omnibus deal. The spending bill also
includes full funding for President Obama’s refugee resettlement program, which
will cost $1.6 billion and bring in another 85,000 refugees this year, many of
them from jihadist hotbeds like Syria, Somalia, Iraq and Afghanistan.
The timing of the bill
comes as a record number of blue-collar American workers can’t find a job at
all, said Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala. “At a time when the civilian labor force
participation rate in the U.S. is approximately 62.4%, now is not the time to
advance legislation further depressing wages and employment for U.S. workers,”
Sessions said in a letter to the chairs of the Senate appropriations committee.
But this is not the
first time Congress has tried to include such a dramatic infusion of foreign
labor into the lower rung of the U.S. job market.
The Gang of Eight bill
in 2013, co-sponsored by Sen. Marco Rubio, also increased the controversial
H-2B visa that brings in foreign workers to fill jobs as construction workers,
restaurant employees, hotel maids and industrial workers.
In just the case of
construction, there are six unemployed construction workers for each job
opening, according to a study
by the Economic Policy Institute. Yet the omnibus released around 2 a.m, Wednesday, would as much
as quadruple the H-2B visa in an unadvertised provision secreted into the more
than 2,000-page bill.
Labor unions are expected to kick up a fuss, but the bill could be voted on before news of the provision reaches the rank and file. The last-minute insert was sponsored by Sens. Barbara Mikulski, D-Md., and Thom Tillis, R-N.C. A bipartisan group of senators opposes the bill, including Sessions, Bernie Sanders, D-Vt., and Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn.
The bill appears to be a
copy of the Save Our Small and Seasonal Business Act, or SOSSBA, according to
an op-ed in National Review by immigration attorney Ian Smith.
Smith wrote: “Like SOSSBA, the Mikulski-Tillis bill would
exclude returning H-2B temporary workers from the normal annual cap of 66,000.
Although SOSSBA was previously in place, Congress failed to renew it in 2008.
The H-2B program is designed to import temporary, seasonal, non-agricultural
guest workers, mostly in the areas of landscaping, forestry, hotels, seafood
processing, restaurants, amusement parks, and construction. Many of these
unskilled jobs traditionally go to society’s most vulnerable — including single
women, the disabled, the elderly, minorities, teenagers, students, and
first-generation immigrants.”
Chamber of Commerce
backs guest-worker program
But large corporate
employers love the program because, as with the H-1B program for skilled
foreign guest-workers, the worker’s visa is tied to his employment. This makes
him more easily controllable and less likely to be lured away by a competitor.
The U.S. Chamber of
Commerce lists expanding the H-2B program as one of its “Policy Priorities for
2015.” “And like most of our immigration programs, the H-2B operates
mechanistically, giving jobs to foreign workers without any consideration for
domestic labor conditions: Regardless of the state of the economy, the cap
stays the same,” Smith writes.
Although SOSSBA includes
a reference to “small businesses,” most H-2B employers, according to the Center
for Immigration Studies, are not small or seasonal – they are mid- to
large-size companies and recruiters who petition for H-2Bs so they can hire
employees who work in the U.S. for 10 months out of the year, year after year,
said Smith, who works for the Immigration Reform Law Institute.
And that’s why the
corporate lobby, led by the Chamber, is pushing hard for this provision. This
lobby has invested heavily in North Carolina’s junior senator, Thom Tillis, and
in Maryland’s Mikulski.
“In 2008, CIS found that
Mikulski, a long-time champion of SOSSBA, received tens of thousands of dollars
of campaign contributions from the biggest users of the program,” Smith said. Like
Maryland, Tillis’s state of North Carolina is a big user of the program. “His
state in particular was recently the subject of an investigative Buzzfeed
report about H-2Bs. The report, which also profiled the nearly identical H-2A
program for temporary agricultural workers, zeroed in on the program’s
loopholes and its damaging effects on American labor, most notably on African
Americans,” Smith writes.
Exploiting loopholes
Although the H-2B
program requires employers to advertise job openings prior to petitioning for
guest workers, the ads are designed to attract as little attention from
American workers as possible, according to Smith. “Buzzfeed found that while
employers do post ads for American workers, they employ numerous strategies to
make sure no one actually responds. The investigation found that one
guest-worker employer, Talbott’s Honey of South Dakota, ran ads in newspapers
in Texas and New Mexico, hundreds of miles away from its area of operation.
Similarly, in North Carolina, the state’s online job board incorrectly posted
seasonal Christmas-tree-cutting jobs ‘in the wrong counties, sometimes hundreds
of miles from any pine forests.’”
As a result, Buzzfeed
reported, “workers looking for Christmas-tree work close to home face a
peculiar paradox: The only way to find the openings nearby is to search in a
faraway corner of the state.” Other ads across the country simply failed to
include contact information or the name of the company.
Another clever tactic of
H-2B employers is to include overly stringent requirements in the want ads. Lori
Johnson, a lawyer from Legal Aid of North Carolina, told Buzzfeed that there is
little evidence such requirements are ever imposed on the foreign guest workers
who ultimately get the jobs. The ads are designed to “filter out U.S. workers,”
Johnson concludes.
This may explain why, in
fiscal 2015, only 505 American farmworkers in North Carolina found jobs from
listings on the state’s Department of Commerce’s website, even though more than
7,000 American farmworkers in the state had registered with the agency to seek
work.
“Quadrupling the number
of H-2B visas will artificially increase competition for the jobs that
typically go to the nation’s most vulnerable. Black unemployment in North Carolina,
for instance, is 17 percent, four times the U.S. average and the fourth-highest
rate for blacks across the nation. Members of Congress from Maryland and North
Carolina, such as Congressional Black Caucus chairman G. K. Butterfield (D.,
N.C.), should join the bipartisan effort to condemn the bill,” Smith concluded.
There’s a reason GOP voters are in ‘open rebellion’
Sessions is leading the
opposition from the conservative side. The voters put Republicans in a majority
in the 2014 midterm elections – a vote that constituted a clear decision
to reject the abuse of our immigration system. That loyalty has been repaid
with betrayal, Sessions said in a statement released Wednesday.
“On top of this
provision, the omnibus approves – without conditions – the president’s request
for increased refugee admissions, allowing him to bring in as many refugees as
he wants, from anywhere he wants, and then allow them to access unlimited
amounts of welfare and entitlements at taxpayer expense. This will ensure that at
least 170,000 green card, refugee and asylum approvals are issued to migrants
from Muslim countries over just the next 12 months.
“In March, I sent
appropriators a list of several dozen provisions for inclusion in our funding
bills to improve immigration enforcement and block presidential lawlessness;
those provisions were rejected – yet industry’s request for more foreign
workers, and the president’s request for refugee funds, were unconditionally
approved.
“The bill also funds
sanctuary cities and illegal alien resettlement, allows the president to
continue issuing visas to countries that refuse to repatriate violent criminal
aliens, and funds the president’s ongoing lawless immigration actions –
including his unimpeded 2012 executive amnesty for alien youth.
“As feared, the effect
is to fund the president’s entire immigration agenda.” There’s a reason that
GOP voters are in “open rebellion,” Sessions said. “This legislation represents
a further disenfranchisement of the American voter,” Sessions said.
http://www.wnd.com/2015/12/secret-deal-quadruples-foreign-workers-in-u-s/
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